Warp Zoned Presents
Author: Joshua Wise
The Path Our Enemy Forges: Shadow of Mordor and Mimetic Desire
WARNING: This article will contain spoilers for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.
Whatever we may think about the universe, it is clear that John Reginald Reuel Tolkien firmly believed in an objective good and evil. A Roman Catholic who took his faith seriously, he shaped his fictional world of Middle-Earth to broadly fit a Christian worldview. A good and all-powerful God created the world from nothing. The angelic powers, some of whom fall into evil, exist as part of the created order. The world’s future hangs on the moral choices of common people. Evil is characterized as a turning away from the objective good, not merely an action that is deemed destructive by the social norms of the dominating culture. In fact, evil must be identified and confronted even though the dominating culture approves it.
Tolkien’s understanding of objective moral good and evil is demonstrated in his meditations on temptation in The Lord of the Rings. Boromir, a valiant but weak man, contemplates the use of the One Ring against Sauron. Faramir and Tom Bombadil, bastions of moral goodness, are unaffected by its draw. The power of the One Ring to dominate and to change free beings into thralls is disdained by those who recognize its means as objectively evil.
However, in Monolith’s recent hit, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the player finds himself or herself doing battle with Sauron, not by taking the moral high-road and trusting good to overcome evil, but by wielding powers similar to Sauron himself. By dominating orcs and turning them against each other and their masters, players wield creatures with will and self-knowledge as pawns in a larger game. More than once, the high elf Celebrimbor states that the only way to overcome Sauron is to match him in determination, and to use his own powers against him. When the ranger Talion asks the Elven Lord how he can control the orcs, Celebrimbor states that when Morgoth (Sauron’s predecessor) created the orcs as a mockery of the elves, he made them to be dominated. Celebrimbor is merely walking the same path that his enemy forged. (more…)
The Cross and the Controller: BioShock Infinite and Social Exclusion
Joshua Wise is the founder of Crossed Purposes. Crossed Purposes is a website which engages pop culture and theology through reviews, discussion and a weekly podcast. It looks at video games, books, movies, television, and music from a number of different theological disciplines including Systematic, Historical, Liturgical, and Biblical.
BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games’ second BioShock adventure,1 is a masterpiece of world-building and a penetrating insight into the extremes of American civil religion, the nationalization of religious traditions, and the vicious cycle of isolation, division, and insular identities. (more…)
The Walking Dead: Episode 2 Review: A Satisfying Second Course
The strength or weakness of an episodic series is its ability to keep the player interested in doing the same things in new situations after a significant break. Enabling the player to care about the characters is another important factor as well. These are things previous episodic Telltale games have stumbled at a bit. Sam & Max don’t exactly change, nor are we embroiled in their dramatic arcs. Marty and Doc seem to be fairly static characters as well who are on a mission specifically to prevent or reverse any change that might occur. But the characters in The Walking Dead are involved in a drama that pulls the player forward in a way that Sam & Max and Back to the Future never quite managed. (more…)
Max Payne 3 Review: Another One of These, and Make it Strong
So here I am, reviewing Max Payne 3, and I wonder: was it worth it? Was playing this game worth the frustration, crashes, audio bugs, and insane loading times just to get to the main screen so that I could go through more loading times to get into the game? As I sit here with my head in my hands between sentences, I wonder: How did I get here?
Wavy Lines… Wavy Lines… Wavy Lines… Wavy Lines… Wavy Lines…
(You know, those lines that tell you we’re going back in time, because I thought it would be a good idea to model my review on the opening scene of the game I’m reviewing.) (more…)
The Walking Dead: Episode 1 Review: A New Day For Adventure Games
In a world where nearly every medium is overwhelmed by the undead, yet another zombie game seems gratuitous. Is there really anything more to say about the living dead? Telltale seems to think so. And, from the first episode of their new game series based on Robert Kirkman’s massively successful comic, The Walking Dead, I can’t help but agree. (more…)
The Cross and The Controller: The Darkness II Shines a Light on Religious History
On the face of it, The Darkness II, by Digital Extremes, simply doesn’t seem like the kind of game I should be praising for its use of religion. It stars a character, Jackie Estacado, who is, by all rights, a very bad man. He wields a living weapon known as “The Darkness” that hates God and light in order to maintain his control of his New York-based mafia family. The game features other demonic characters as well as brutal and wildly graphic violence. (more…)
Silent Hill: Downpour Review: That Old-Timey Feeling
It probably goes without saying that Silent Hill 2 is the yardstick for all of the games in the series that have come after. But it’s important to establish that high water mark before attempting to understand Silent Hill: Downpour, a game designed with more than an an eye toward that early achievement in the series. (more…)
Posted in PS3, Reviews, Top Story, Xbox 360
Tagged Silent Hill: Downpour
The Cross and The Controller: Mass Effect’s Picture of Faith
SPOILER WARNING: This article will talk about the death of a major character in Mass Effect 3 that takes place about a third of the way through the game… unless, of course, that character died in your playthrough of Mass Effect 2.
Prayer is a very strange thing. It takes numerous forms, from the recitation of memorized words, often ancient, to the spontaneous utterances of exuberant or anguished hearts. It can be practiced in deep silence, and it can be as informal as a muttered word for help before a surgery or a battle. Prayer flows out of human beings; we seem to be hardwired for it, either by some quirk of natural selection or through deep enculturation. The old saying “there are no atheists in foxholes” suggests the fact that, at our core, humanity is a praying species.
It’s important to note that none of this is an apologetic for the existence of God. One needs a particular understanding of the bare facts to interpret them in any particular way. Our penchant for prayer may be a quirk of genetic mutation; it may be a result of millennia of conditioning. Neither suggests that there is anyone listening to our prayer. So, while I do believe that our prayers are heard, I do not think the fact that we pray is somehow proof of that. (more…)